The Republican Party’s campaign to attract more Black and brown voters suffered another setback when the Iowa Republican Black & Brown Presidential Forum was cancelled. Santorum, whose low polling numbers have routinely kept him from the main stage at the debates sanctioned by the Republican National Committee, got to sit with his fellow candidates and air one of his trademark themes.
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Ted Cruz has gained ground – and Ben Carson has lost ground – among some key voting groups in Iowa: evangelicals, Tea Party supporters, those who are very conservative and older voters. “I know there’s some people in the audience who wish they would”.
And while Carson and Trump remain very popular, some other measures of the electorate are pointing toward the second option – and the candidate they’re largely pointing to is U.S. Sen.
Republican presidential candiate Sen. Ted Cruz may not have won over any University of Texas Longhorns fans after making a jab at the football team’s 24-0 loss to Iowa State. “Tone matters”, Cruz told the AP over the weekend. He predicted it won’t be a four-candidate race for long: “That will be pared down to three”.
The Republican Party of Iowa has canceled its plan to host a forum featuring presidential candidates that would have focused on minority communities.
Both Rubio and Cruz say comprehensive immigration reform shouldn’t be considered until the U.S.-Mexico border is secure, with Cruz calling for a halt on all immigration – legal or not – until unemployment decreases. Rick Santorum and former technology executive Carly Fiorina. “We’re going to try and pull you over”. SC becomes his firewall, but there, if Cruz does not win Iowa, he will have to compete against the Iowa victor. He’s also rumored to be close to clinching the endorsement of influential evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats. “We’re going to make them defend that 7 pound babies have no rights a minute before they’re born”, he said.
“When Barack Obama in San Francisco said we were bitter and angry and clinging to our guns”, Cruz says, “well, we’re not bitter, we’re getting pretty angry, and he can’t have either our God or our guns”.
Asked of the evening’s protests bothered him, Huckabee said no. “It doesn’t bother me because I realize that it’s a reminder that we live in the greatest country on Earth and we allow people to disagree with us”, he said.
But Iowa Republicans retain a hopeful optimism that the state will only reward those who put in the legwork – even if that hasn’t yet been borne out by the polls so far.
As recently as last February, when ISIS atrocities were in the news, Cruz said in a Fox News interview that America had “welcomed refugees, the exhausted, huddled masses, for centuries” and that it was possible to screen out possible terrorists among Syrians escaping violence.
“Many of these are the same people”, Brown says. “One on one, you can see their personality”. While he distanced himself Friday from Trump’s flirtation with a national registry for American Muslims, Cruz chastised reporters for the umpteenth time when they tried to coax a sharper contrast out of him. Ruled out as an unlikely victor by much of the commentariat months ago, Cruz has been quietly plodding along, and he’s catching up to the frontrunners.
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“For the two-week rolling average of November 7-21, as noted, Christie scored a net favorable rating of 26, his highest score since Gallup began tracking, and a remarkable turnaround for a candidate who, at times, had a net-negative image among Republicans”, Gallup noted. Cruz says he has the money and organization to prevail in the so-called SEC primary, but former NY mayor Rudy Giuliani learned the hard way that you can not lose repeatedly and pin your hopes on later primaries.
